Bond No. 9 boutique, 9 Bond Street, New York

There are a lot of clichés about American perfumery. Americans like to smell clean, while everyone else in the world likes to smell dirty; American perfumes are all about things you can eat, mostly fruit but occasionally coffee, chocolate or cake; the United States produces a lot of smells, but has yet to produce a truly great fragrance house. Bond No. 9 aims to challenge all of these.

But does it succeed?

Hmm.

I spent a long time in the flagship store, fighting off some supercilious assistants, all armed with that overtrained, po-faced, robotic sales patter that some American corporations seem to think the customer would like more than talking to an actual responsive human with a personality, a sense of humour and some opinions.

Bodes badly, right?

Right.

I see the Bon-Bon Box (above) in the window, What a lovely thing! How shiny! Lots of little smells, beautifully packaged! An ideal gift for Violet, Beverly or Mr Atrocity! I sally forth to the testing counter to poke my nose into their business.

Chinatown is supposed to be Bond's truly great scent, so that's where I start. And, yes, it's good. A complex, intelligent peach'n'patchouli oriental that manages to be elegant and pleasing at every stage. But that's it. Pleasing. I am pleased. There's nothing about Chinatown that challenges or surprises me. It is chic and polished, and as it progresses goes through a formal, controlled, unobjectionable sequence. It's a lot like the sales assistants.

It's good, all right? And there's something alluring about perfect poise. But I can't find it in my heart - or, for that matter, my nose - to love something so very orderly. So very safe.

Next I try Andy Warhol Silver Factory, one of a range inspired by the artist. Again, it's good. A smart, careful balancing of Warhol's favourite smells: violet, incense and woods. It dries down to something nice. It is nice. I am pleased. I might be even more pleased than I was with Chinatown. And yet my heart rate is unchanged.

I look bored. "This is our bestseller," monotones the assistant, spraying me with a cloud of something purple called The Scent of Peace. Horrific name, and horrific... at last! Something that produces a reaction! Unfortunately, that reaction is sneezing, because I'm being drowned in grapefruit! Look, if I wanted to smell like The Body Shop, I wouldn't have to spend $130 on a bottle. And that's the small size. (They vary. Silver Factory comes in at a whopping $230.)

I plead for something less like bath gel, and a succession of spicies is paraded in front of me: Nuits de Noho (vanilla/patchouli), Great Jones (cedar), Wall Street (lavender/vetiver), HOT Always (cinnamon/bergamot). They're all fine. Great Jones is very fine. I sniff it again. Yes, very fine. I am pleased.

It's very hard to object to any of them. Except they're so... thin. There's no body, no sensuousness, no emotion.

Tom Wolfe, in that quintessential New York novel Bonfire of the Vanities, describes a certain type of socialite women. These women are ageing but heavily into artificial preservation, rail-thin, perfectly blowdried and manicured: simultaneously satirising their appearance and their brittle vapidity, he calls them "social X-rays".

I bet the social X-rays love Bond No. 9.

I stumbled back on to the street, outwardly pleased but inwardly disappointed, my wallet no lighter. Bond No. 9 makes a very tasteful range of well-produced scents. If you wear one (pretty much any one, apart from that horrible Peace thing), you will project an aura of immaculate luxury, and you won't offend anyone.

That's just not what I'm after in a perfume. But, then again, I am a European.

Angel (Thierry Mugler, 1992, Olivier Cresp & Yves de Chiris)

Chocolate, patchouli, vanilla, caramel.

We've all been talking about some of our favourite fragrances: I think it's high time one of us wrote about our least favourite.

There's no denying that Angel has had a huge effect on the perfume industry: it effectively created the market for comestibles and has been imitated time and time again. I respect that creativity. However, the smell makes me want to puke.

If one were to melt down a whole load of cheapo advent-calendar chocolates, and then stir in a bottle of patchouli room-fragrance oil, and then drink the resulting curdled substance, I'd imagine that would be quite a bit like the experience of sniffing Angel. People say Angel is sexy, but since the image it conjures up for me is of a dozen toddlers vomiting after overdosing on Hershey's, sex is approximately the furthest thing from my mind. It is a rancid, ghastly smell, that flatly refuses to die down or mix with human body smell at all. It's so strong that my throat starts to burn if I share a tube carriage with an Angel wearer and it smells of identical choco-patcho-vomit on everybody.

(Fun true story: my first encounter with Angel was shortly after its release, in the duty free at Heathrow. The shop assistant lady squirted some on to my arm. My stomach turned; I ran to the loos to try and wash it off, but no luck. On the following eight-hour flight to New York, I took trips to the lavatory every hour to try another feeble attempt at scrubbing it off my wrists with the free British Airways toothbrush. Result: red, raw, bleeding wrists, that still stank of Angel. When we finally reached the hotel, I leaped into the shower before I'd even sat down.)

Good god, I hate it so very much. If I could wipe every bottle off the planet in the interest of my own mental health, I would.